Guy Maddin film wins $10,000 prize
Guy Maddin's bizarre tribute to his hometown, My Winnipeg, has won a new $10,000 film prize.
The avant-garde director was given the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, presented by the Toronto Film Critics Association. A gala dinner was scheduled Tuesday to recognize the association's favourite releases of 2008.
Sarah Polley, whose film, Away From Her was named best Canadian feature last year, was due to present the award to Maddin in front of an audience expected to include heavyweight filmmakers including Atom Egoyan, Robert Lantos, Bruce McDonald and Don McKellar.
Other films in the running were Stephane Lafleur's film, Continental: A Film Without Guns, and Yung Chang's acclaimed documentary Up the Yangtze, about the issues surrounding the Three Gorges Dam in China.
"Our three finalists for the year's Best Canadian Film are all strongly evocative tales of characters adrift in manufactured landscapes," association president Brian Johnson, film critic for Maclean's magazine, said in a release.
"My Winnipeg gleefully obliterates the line between fact and fiction, documentary and drama between lucid memoir and fevered dream. It's an exquisitely Canadian film that has won praise from around the world, and we are pleased to add our voice to the acclaim with this inaugural prize."
Established in 1997, the Toronto Film Critics Association is comprised of Toronto-based journalists and broadcasters who specialize in film criticism and commentary.
'Dark Knight,' 'Iron Man' battle for visual effects Oscar
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Superheroes Batman, Iron Man and Hellboy are mixing it up with Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman and an ancient mummy for the visual-effects Academy Award.
The Batman blockbuster The Dark Knight is one of seven films competing for the Oscar, along with fellow comic-book adaptations Iron Man and Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
The other four nominees Tuesday: Kidman's Australia, Pitt's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and two Brendan Fraser actioners, Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.
Members of the academy's visual-effects branch will view 15-minute excerpts from each film and choose three nominees for the Feb. 22 Oscars.
The Oscar nominations come out Jan. 22.
Apple disappoints--no Jobs or big news at Macworld
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday said it was dropping copy protection from songs sold on the Internet and debuted its slimmest 17-inch laptop yet, but with no dramatic products or master pitchman Steve Jobs, the company's final Macworld performance disappointed Wall Street.
Apple shares slid 0.7 percent, lagging by far the Nasdaq's 1.7 percent gain, reflecting frustration over the lack of news from the trade conference that had previously introduced the iPhone to the world.
"There were some innovative products, but no true blockbusters," said Robert Francello, head of equity trading for Apex Capital hedge fund in San Francisco. "People were bullish going into it, and now they're kind of taking money off the table."
Apple said its iTunes music store, which has sold 6 billion songs thus far, will offer its 10-million-song library free of digital rights management -- or copy-protection -- by the end of the quarter, for between 69 cents and $1.29 a song.
Songs will also be available straight to iPhones over the air, instead of through a computer.
The company decided not use Macworld to launch any major new product, as it had in past years, when it introduced such industry-changing devices as the iPhone.
In years past, the company's Macworld product launches had produced so much buzz that they managed to overshadow events at the far larger Consumer Electronics Show. The 2009 CES show kicks off this week in Las Vegas.
Tuesday's event produced few surprises. Apple announced a $2,799 17-inch laptop that is the company's lightest and slimmest ever, as well as tweaks to software for home movies and photographs.
The event culminated with singer Tony Bennett crooning "The Best is Yet to Come" and "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" in a farewell of sorts to Apple, which will no longer attend the cultural event thronged annually by Mac-faithful.
Jobs, a fixture at past events, was nowhere in sight, despite some hopes for a cameo. Last month, the company said its chief executive and salesman extraordinaire would not deliver the Macworld address. That raised fresh concerns about the cancer survivor's health and signaled to many Apple-watchers that the company had no plans to launch a major product at Macworld.
'24's' Jack Bauer relocates to Washington
WASHINGTON – Early one cold November morning, actress Annie Wersching leads Kiefer Sutherland to an "armored" SUV with dark windows parked outside the U.S. Department of Agriculture building.
After director Brad Turner yells "Cut," onlookers snap photos of the star. Sutherland spots a participant in a charity run for Lupus on the Washington Mall and comments, "Why is that guy wearing shorts? It's cold."
Where Sutherland normally works, people wear shorts year round. Welcome to Washington, Jack Bauer.
A little over a year ago, Sutherland and the crew of his popular Fox TV series, "24," came to the nation's capital to film segments of the show's seventh season. The completion of that season was delayed a year by the Writers Guild strike, but it finally makes its debut in a two-night premiere beginning Sunday, Jan. 11 (8 p.m. EST).
Jack Bauer actually returned to the screen this past November in the Fox TV movie "24: Redemption," a series prequel that was set in Africa. Now, the series' new season begins with the intrepid agent for the fictional federal Counter-Terrorist Unit (CTU) forced to return to Washington to face a Senate investigation into his conduct.
"He's called to face charges of abuse of power and torturing certain individuals in an unlawful manner," Sutherland says. "For the first time, he's put in a position to have to confront a lot of the things that he's done."
However, Bauer is pulled from the hearings by FBI agent Renee Walker (Wersching) to help with a more pressing matter — the reappearance of Bauer's thought-to-be-dead fellow agent, Tony Almeida (Carlos Bernard), who is apparently is no longer one of the good guys.
After six years of making "24" mainly in Los Angeles, the production thought it was finally time to take the show to the home of oft-seen presidents in the series. "We wondered if that was starting to bother people," laughs director Turner.
While filming in Washington isn't new for fed-themed action series, it was a welcome change for the "24" team. "It was kind of like going on a field trip," Bernard says.
Shooting here lends the show a sense of realism impossible to produce by simply intercutting stock "plate" shots of Washington with scenes shot in Hollywood. "To have the Washington Monument in the background of a drive-up, and in a simple, incidental way, just tells you you're in Washington," explains cinematographer Rodney Charters. "That's a pretty hard thing to fake."
Turner and his crew searched the season's early scripts for opportunities to make use of recognizable Washington locales. "It was a matter of finding moments to get scenes on the street, and do it naturally so that it's seamless," the director says. Adds Sutherland, "If you can take advantage of getting iconic places like the Capitol or the Lincoln Memorial in a shot, you try and do that. It's like a postcard for us."
Yet doing so isn't a simple matter of setting up a camera and taking pictures, particularly in a security-sensitive city such as Washington. "There are 17 different jurisdictions to deal with, some with their own police forces," says Jon Pare, the show's production manager. "Sometimes, when you leave a curb and step into a street, you've just crossed a jurisdiction."
But an OK from the District of Columbia to film on a sidewalk and one from the National Park Service for the grass beyond may still not be enough.
"There's one place I can think of specifically where the sidewalk is divided into three different jurisdictions," says local location manager John Latenser. Simply put, "Washington, D.C. is the most difficult city in the United States to film in."
But for the actors, it's worth all the trouble. "You're constantly aware you're in a capital city," says Sutherland. "You can feel the power of it, the sense of responsibility that's in the air all the time. Somehow it felt like more was at stake."
Even a visit to the Capital Grille, a stylish restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue, left an impression on the actor. "Three tables over, there were three men that were talking about something that was going to have an impact on our lives," he says.
Among the many loyal fans of "24" is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose office said he was thrilled to see Sutherland's acting and stunts in person when he visited the set the following day.
"He's a fan of the show and checked out what we were doing. He's always been really gracious and kind with us," Sutherland says. The crew even visited the real CTU — the National Counterterrorism Center — while in Washington.
Meanwhile, fans greet Sutherland as he arrives in the toney Georgetown section of Washington to film a scene at a house once occupied by John F. Kennedy.
"I'm just waiting for (Sutherland) to break into Jack Bauer mode and start neck-punching people," says bystander Kim Sandlin. "I'm looking forward to having Jack Bauer's blood on our sidewalk!"
Obama picks CNN's TV doctor as surgeon general: reports
WASHINGTON (AFP) – President-elect Barack Obama wants CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta to be his surgeon general and serve as chief overseer of Americans' health, the network said Tuesday.
Gupta, a neurosurgeon who is well known from his television and print reporting on medical matters, would bring star power to a job that normally labors in obscurity.
CNN's management confirmed that Gupta had been approached by the Obama team. The Atlanta-based media celebrity was said to be considering a move to Washington to take on the job, which requires Senate confirmation.
Reports by CNN itself along with other networks and the Washington Post said Obama's transition team was impressed by Gupta's communications skills and his past experience in government as a White House adviser during the 1990s.
In a statement, CNN management said: "Since first learning that Dr Gupta was under consideration for the surgeon general position, CNN has made sure that his on-air reporting has been on health and wellness matters and not on health-care policy or any matters involving the new administration."
A transition spokesman declined to comment on the reports.
As head of the 6,000-member Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the surgeon general acts as the government's chief educator on public health issues, but has little direct role in policy-making.
The position is perhaps best known to Americans through the surgeon general's health warnings printed on all cigarette packets sold in the country.